From November 4, 2022 post

 Ahead of Election Day, news outlets are reporting that the North Carolina Senate race is among those “most likely to flip” as outlets note Cheri’s “savvy” campaign stating that “Beasley has a shot” and has “energized a key demographic — Black voters” in the “neck-and-neck battle” between candidate for U.S. Senate Cheri Beasley and Congressman Ted Budd.

Rolling Stone published a profile on Cheri, noting she has the potential to be “the state’s first Black U.S. Senator,” and has rewritten the playbook when it comes to campaigning in North Carolina. The outlet reported that Cheri’s “savvy” campaign is “operating under the belief that black North Carolinians, who make up a large share of the state’s rural voters, can help her reverse the recent trend against Democrats in this state.” 

Rolling Stone highlighted that Cheri is “refreshingly, all substance and very little flash,” and is a “stronger candidate” than past Senate candidates from North Carolina, having “run three statewide campaigns” before, and earning early support from outside organizations who saw her potential. 

Nonpartisan race raters, the National Journal Hotline, published their updated Senate power rankings with North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race now being ranked second most likely to flip from red to blue in a “neck-and-neck battle” between candidate for U.S. Senate Cheri Beasley and Congressman Ted Budd in the race where “anything can happen.” National Journal noted that Cheri has “run a disciplined campaign” with a commitment to being “an independent voice for the state.” 

CNN reported that Cheri is reaching voters “beyond the burgeoning party strongholds in Charlotte and the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill,” by speaking with voters in rural communities, and reaching out to people who haven’t voted in a while. CNN also noted “how early and aggressively [Cheri] worked to define herself,” in this race that is “critical to deciding the balance of power in Washington.” Outlets are also emphasizing that Cheri is “meeting voters at churches around the state,” and holding “Souls to the Polls” events in an “effort to get church goers to the ballot box.”

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone noted that Congressman Ted Budd “will be the most hard-right senator North Carolina has sent to Washington since Jesse Helms,” and is a member of the “far-right Freedom Caucus,” who “has a long record of protests votes,” including his vote “to overturn the election results” of 2020. National outlets also noted that Congressman Ted Budd missed more votes “than any lawmaker who will be on the ballot” while campaigning “for a promotion to the Senate.” CNN called out Congressman Budd’s hypocrisy when it comes to voting proxy, noting Congressman Budd’s “negative view of proxy voting and even cosponsored legislation to withhold pay of any member who votes remotely,” but he voted “remotely several times at the end of September.” Outlets went on to note that Congressman Budd has been running “an incredibly low-key campaign, trailing Beasley in fundraising and letting outside groups do most of the dirty work for him” and emphasized his extreme record including that he “voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and cosponsored a federal abortion ban in the House.” 

Read the highlights here: 

The Technician: GUEST ESSAY: Cheri Beasley — This election is about your future

Rolling Stone: Cheri Beasley Is Running for More Than a Senate Seat In North Carolina
By Tessa Stuart
November 4, 2022 

The former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court hopped out at the first in a long list of stops she’s making today as she hopscotches across North Carolina, searching for enough votes to make her the state’s first Black U.S. Senator.

You wouldn’t normally find a Democrat running for national office here in Granville County. In the past, Democrats seeking national office in North Carolina have stuck to a familiar playbook: run up the margins in the urban centers and just try to staunch the bleeding in rural areas. Beasley’s campaign is breaking from that tradition, operating under the belief that black North Carolinians, who make up a large share of the state’s rural voters, can help her reverse the recent trend against Democrats in this state. 

The USDA has since admitted to discriminatory lending practices that disadvantaged black farmers like the Barkers in the eighties and nineties, and there have been efforts to address the lingering effects of that discrimination: a class action settlement (one of the largest civil rights settlements ever at the time) in 1999, and more recent legislation like the Emergency Debt Relief for Farmers of Color Act, which passed Congress last year.

Rep. Ted Budd, running against Beasley for Senate, voted against that legislation and, even more controversially in a state where agriculture is still the number one industry, he voted against the five-year farm bill as well. Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, chair of the agriculture committee, out stumping with Beasley today, blinks in disbelief as she recounts the fact that 369 members of the House voted for the bill. Budd was one of just 47 members to oppose it. “We had 87 members of the Senate out of 100 — you don’t get that vote on anything because it’s bipartisan,” Stabenow exclaims. “And yet her opponent voted no! I could not believe that.” Beasley shook her head, murmuring almost under her breath: “He calls himself a farmer!”

Before I go any further it must be said: Beasley is not the most quotable candidate on the campaign trail this year. She might even be the least quotable candidate running for Senate. A former judge, she speaks in measured tones, more often in paragraphs than soundbites. She is thoughtful and circumspect, disciplined, relentlessly on message. Which, of course, is what one would want in someone responsible for running the government, even if it is not what voters have been accustomed to lately, with our gaffe-prone current president or his stream-of-conscious spewing predecessor. In a field chock full of superficial celebrity hucksters Mehmet Oz and Herschel Walker, Beasley is, refreshingly, all substance and very little flash. 

Beasley is a stronger candidate than Cunningham: She’s run three statewide campaigns for state Supreme Court, winning two of them in years that other Democrats struggled, like 2014 when they lost control of their last Senate seat. In her third race in 2020, she fell short by just 401 votes; President Biden, meanwhile, lost the state by 11,000. That crossover appeal is crucial in North Carolina, where the largest share of voters are not Republican or Democrat, but unaffiliated voters, who outnumber registrants of both parties. Beasley, who spent the majority of her career as a nonpartisan judge, can credibly appeal to that segment of the electorate. “They are not at all engaged or inspired by the pettiness of partisan politics,” Beasley told me of the voters she’s met with this campaign.

The Democratic Party may have dragged its heels getting into this race (the Senate Majority PAC made two last-minute cash infusions of $4 million each in October, bringing its total outlay to $15 million; in 2020, by contrast, it had reserved more than $25 million worth of airtime in the state as early as March). But outside organizations saw early potential in Beasley. She was the first non-incumbent EMILY’s List endorsed this election cycle. The pro-choice PAC has a knack for picking winners: 85 percent of the candidates they backed triumphed their primaries this year. “We have always thought that North Carolina could and should be in play,” says Laphonza Butler, president of EMILY’s List. Butler cited Beasley’s background as a judge and experience running statewide campaigns as two of the factors that made her “an incredibly attractive candidate for North Carolina voters, particularly in this moment.”

The campaign has demonstrated savvy too: making the counterintuitive decision to start advertising early in the summer, introducing Beasley to voters long before outside groups like the Club for Growth began carpet bombing the airwaves with ads cherry-picking past judgements to cast her as “dangerously liberal” and “soft on crime.” 

If elected, Budd will be the most hard-right senator North Carolina has sent to Washington since Jesse Helms. He is one of only three members of North Carolina’s fairly conservative House delegation who have joined the far-right Freedom Caucus. (The other two are Madison Cawthorn and Dan Bishop, the author of North Carolina’s infamous bathroom bill.) He has a long record of protests votes against even the most inoffensive bipartisan efforts: besides the five-year farm bill, Budd voted against the CHIPS Act, intended to boost semiconductor manufacturing — another big industry in North Carolina. Budd voted against a bill to help ease the baby formula shortage, against infrastructure legislation, against the Inflation Reduction Act, against a gun safety bill supported by both of North Carolina’s current Republican Senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr. Budd voted, too, to overturn the election results.

Former Republican governor Pat McCrory, a primary rival of Budd’s, has been blunt in his assessment of Budd’s campaign: “He’s in hiding,” McCrory told a reporter in August. GOP strategists have admitted to being nervous about Budd’s chances, concerned in particular about his ability to reach out to the independent voters he needs to attract in order to win. Outside groups have stepped in to shore up Budd’s campaign: In addition to Club For Growth Action, which has spent at least $7 million boosting Budd, the Senate Leadership Fund has poured $29 million into the North Carolina race.

But the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end federal protections for abortion has thrown an additional spike strip in Budd’s path to victory. His views on the issue could not be more extreme: Budd has said he supports outlawing abortion even in cases of rape and incest and has gone further than even the most rabid anti-abortion groups, by raising questions about whether there should be exceptions if a woman’s life is at stake. Asked point-blank if he opposed an abortion ban even if “the mother may die from giving birth?” Budd replied: “I think that’s something you have to look at.”

In spite of the clear contrasts between them, the contest between Beasley and Budd remains neck-and-neck: 44 to 44 among registered voters in North Carolina according to a Marist poll released late last week.

Beasley recognizes that threat, and it’s one of the reasons why she chose to run this year. On the campaign trail, she often speaks about her mother, who was granted the right to vote with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. “To think about the fact that voting rights are on the line, when a generation ago, my mother and my grandparents were granted the right to vote? Here we are still a generation later, still fighting to secure the right to vote,” Beasley shakes her head. She adds, simply: “I will always fight when our freedoms are on the line.”

After all he and his family have been through, Phillip Barker, the owner of the farm, has more reason than most to be cynical about the political process, and pessimistic about an election like this one. But he’s not. “Fox News puts a lot of negative stuff out there, and people have a tendency to buy into it, but, for me, I think she has a very good chance,” Barker says. “I think we’re going to wake up on the ninth in better shape than we think we are.”

National Journal Hotline: North Carolina Senate Race Now Ranked Second Most Likely to Flip Red to Blue
October 30, 2022 

5. North Carolina—Open (R) 

Republican Rep. Ted Budd and former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley have been locked in a neck-and-neck battle for months in a race that’s largely gone under the radar. After securing Trump’s endorsement, Budd has run an incredibly low-key campaign, trailing Beasley in fundraising and letting outside groups do most of the dirty work for him. 

Beasley has run a disciplined campaign, leaning into her service as the state’s chief justice and her time as a public defender, arguing that she would be an independent voice for the state. 

The state’s last two GOP senators—the retiring Sen. Richard Burr and Sen. Thom Tillis—are considerably more moderate than Budd, who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and cosponsored a federal abortion ban in the House. It’s an open seat, so anything can happen.

NPR: North Carolina fields competitive Senate race despite lack of national attention
By Claudia Grisales
October 31, 2022

Now though, the GOP is facing one of its closest Senate contests in the country. The historic Democratic nomination of Cheri Beasley, the former chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, has boosted supporters’ hopes of turning the seat blue. Beasley has also put up strong polling numbers, trailing Budd but within the margin of error in some polls.

That, and lower-than-expected campaign funding for the race, have some dubbing it a “sleeper race.”

Professor Michael Bitzer of Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C., says the race is not drawing as much money or buzz as Senate races in Georgia, Pennsylvania or elsewhere.

“North Carolina is always a strong, competitive state, and I think that that’s going to play out again this year,” Bitzer said.

Bitzer explained in a race of this caliber, the candidates might have drawn $200 million or more in spending. However, he projects the total this year for the Senate election could be half of that or less.

“[There’s] not a whole lot of attention in terms of things like money coming in, but I think certainly we’re going to have that level of competitiveness yet again,” Bitzer predicted.

Republicans are also using fear tactics to get Republican voters motivated, said Bitzer, the politics professor. But some of those claims are largely false or misleading.

“This is a classic kind of campaign strategy nowadays in American politics. It’s fear and threats that really motivate people to show up to vote,” Bitzer said. “I think what Republicans are trying to do is to frame the issue in the most extreme approach, and say this is what you will get if you elect Democrats.”

Democrats are hoping for a different kind of change: to take a seat held for more than a decade by the GOP, most recently by retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr, and turn it blue.

Beasley, the former chief justice of North Carolina’s Supreme Court who’s now running for Senate, is angling for an upset.

“People really are excited about this race. They understand the sense of urgency around it,” Beasley said at a recent Democratic event in Charlotte.

Beasley is the first African American woman nominated for the role. That has energized a key demographic — Black voters.

To reach that critical constituency, Beasley is meeting voters at churches around the state. She has also been boosted by a “souls to the polls” effort to get church goers to ballot box.

“There’s a lot of power in the church,” Beasley recently told religious leaders at meeting at the Little Rock African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Charlotte. “I grew up in the church. My husband grew up in the church. Our sons grew up in the church. And y’all know, it is not just our religious center. It is our social center and it is our political center.”

At this event, Beasley had a powerful surrogate in House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn. Clyburn played a key role in turning the momentum in Biden’s direction in the runup to the 2020 election.

“This election is the most consequential election of any of our lifetimes!” Clyburn called out.

The South Carolina Democrat argues Republicans are fighting to whitewash education by erasing Black history from schools, curtailing voting and restricting reproductive rights.

“We’ve got to get real! We cannot sit idly by!” Clyburn implored.

But even after abortion rights energized Democratic voters this past summer, Beasley knows inflation is a top priority now.“People want to know that I’m going to get to the Senate and I’m going to address the rising costs,” Beasley told NPR. “People are feeling everything from pain at the pump to the cost of prescription drugs and everything in between.”

Still, McDaniel acknowledges the state is not a slam dunk for Republicans, and the party is closely watching the Senate contest as well as other critical statewide races, including House races and open seats on the state’s supreme court.

CNN: For both parties, North Carolina Senate race is pivotal for 2022 – and 2024
By Edward-Isaac Dovere
November 1, 2022

The tunes were different but the refrains from the Republican senator from Texas and the left-leaning rock star were the same: This year’s North Carolina Senate race could end up being critical to deciding the balance of power in Washington for the next two years.

Over the past 10 years, more North Carolinians have registered as “unaffiliated” than as Democrats and Republicans, and state voters have grown accustomed to elections decided by “razor thin” margins. But Democrats have spent the past few months side-eyeing Beasley, a former state Supreme Court chief justice, as their sleeper insurance policy for holding the evenly divided Senate.

Budd was the first Senate nonincumbent to receive Trump’s endorsement this cycle, and he’s had a full Trump embrace since then, thanks to his own full embrace of the former President. But his connection is more centered on the hard-right politics that Trump tapped into than the former president’s brash style or rhetoric.

While Budd hasn’t been keeping his distance from Trump’s orbit – Donald Trump Jr. stumped with him last month – he has been keeping a lower profile, limiting himself to one public event per day and rarely showing up on Fox News like many other Republican Senate nominees looking for national attention.

A win for Budd would be a further turn to the right for North Carolina: He has a lifetime of 98% on the Heritage Action scorecard, which measures how conservative members of Congress are. (The hard-right group has put money into the race on his behalf.) In comparison, the state’s two Republican senators, retiring Sen. Richard Burr and Sen. Thom Tillis, hold scores of 61% and 64% respectively. Budd voted against certifying the 2020 election in the hours after the pro-Trump mob was cleared from the US Capitol last year. More recently, he was quick to embrace South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposal for a national ban on most abortions after 15 weeks, co-sponsoring the companion House version. He has also voted against raising the debt ceiling.

That left Beasley, who lost her bid for a full term as state Supreme Court chief justice in 2020 by 401 votes, as the rare prominent Democrat left in the state to run. She was also seen as well positioned to withstand the current political environment: She could stand on her record as a judge to rebut attacks that she was soft on crime and could also hold herself up as a Washington outsider without ties to Biden.

In her efforts to end Senate Democrats’ losing streak in North Carolina, Beasley has been chasing votes beyond the burgeoning party strongholds in Charlotte and the Research Triangle of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill – including the hundreds of mostly middle-aged White voters she had cheering for her at the Dave Matthews concert. She’s been dipping into Trump counties, looking to find the disconnected Democrats that she hopes she can still get enthused again.

At an event last week at a senior center in Apex in the Raleigh area, Beasley talked mostly about lowering prices and cast Budd as being in the pocket of corporations for not voting to cut prescription drug and insulin prices. (Budd voted against Democrats’ sweeping health care, tax and climate package known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to lower drug prices and caps insulin costs for Medicare enrollees.)

In an interview after leading the people in the room across a path to an early voting site, Beasley, wearing a “Protect Roe” necklace against her purple dress, deflected a question about Budd and Cruz mocking her for not appearing with Biden. She deflected another question about what the tightness of the race reflected about the North Carolina she knew and the continued resonance of Trump.

Her experience as a judge comes across in her measured manner and in the way she bristles at attacks by falling back on well-balanced, well-rehearsed lines.

Earlier in the summer, Democrats nationally had been citing Beasley as a model for others, pointing out how early and aggressively she’d worked to define herself and firmly distance herself from calls to “defund the police” and other positions popular among the most progressive in her party.

Beasley, in her interview, tacitly acknowledged her frustration with the attacks on her record on the bench that she believes have tried to sensationalize sometimes complex rulings. Budd, she said, was “far more interested in fear-mongering and scaring folks rather than actually providing solutions for folks here in North Carolina.”

“Folks do have a clear choice, and they need to know – clearly – what that is,” she said.

CNN: Why key House members skip many votes
By Manu Raju
November 3, 2022

As he has campaigned for a promotion to the Senate, Ted Budd has been frequently absent from his day job: A member of the US House.

The North Carolina Republican missed more votes than all but three House members since January 2021 – and more than any lawmaker who will be on the ballot in next Tuesday’s elections, according to an analysis by a nonpartisan watchdog group, the Moonlight Foundation. Budd missed 119 votes in this Congress, amounting to 13% of all votes over the last two years, most of which came this year as he has campaigned in North Carolina to fill the seat of the retiring Sen. Richard Burr.

Budd has a similar negative view of proxy voting and even cosponsored legislation to withhold pay of any member who votes remotely, with his campaign saying he “puts his money where his mouth is.” But on four occasions, he did file letters with the House clerk designating a member to vote by proxy on his behalf because of the Covid-19 pandemic, even voting remotely several times at the end of September.

Among the bills that Budd, for instance, missed include ones dealing with providing cybersecurity grants for schools, bolstering oversight on veterans programs, awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the National Hockey League’s first Black player and providing protections for whistleblowers.

The same report said that Budd missed more than 100 votes since running for Senate, “far above the median lifetime record of missed votes.” 

Original source can be found here.